


the things they taught you

by magneticwave



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Warehouse 13, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:17:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People usually go back to their hometowns for things like high school reunions and Christmas and funerals. Of course, <em>usual</em> operates on a sliding scale when you work for the Warehouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the things they taught you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themadfish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themadfish/gifts).



> This is for the totally awesome themadfish, who bid on me for the Wolf Charity auction and won. I was prompted _Teen Wolf_ x _Warehouse 13_ , and I’ve really wanted to write more Boyd/Lydia since I finished _there’ll be no comfort in the shade_ , so naturally this seemed like the ideal circumstances, I don’t know, every night is Boyd/Lydia night when you have twelve tabs open in your browser as you try to invent an artifact. 
> 
> Lesson learned: Casefic is hard, guys.

When Boyd used to picture himself returning to Beacon Hills—which he’d done a lot as a teenager who had no friends and no idea how to go about getting any—it’d usually been framed as a triumphant lap through his hometown after winning the Wolf Prize.  There hadn’t really been the opportunity to dream anything other than big, when Boyd was sixteen and two years younger and five inches taller than all of his classmates; the little dreams, like a girlfriend and a social life, had seemed just as unachievable as landing the second-most prestigious award in physics.

The fantasies had mostly stopped after high school, since he’d done the adult thing and gone to college and brutally repressed his social anxiety through a mixture of total immersion therapy and lots of recovery hours at the gym, where he didn’t have to talk or even look at another person; so in not a single instance of daydreaming had Boyd ever imagined that he’d be thirty-three and coming back to Beacon Hills with Stiles Stilinski snoring in the passenger seat of his Subaru rental.

When they pass the _WELCOME TO BEACON HILLS_ sign, which is overpowered by the “Support the Hurricanes” billboard propped twenty feet down the road on a set of iron stilts, Boyd turns down NPR and says, “Stiles, get up.”

They’ve been partners for five years, so Boyd knows to follow that up with a quick elbow to the shoulder.

“ _OH MY GOD_ ,” Stiles says when he wakes up, which is business as usual. “Oh, look, we’re here. _Are_ we here?” He leans up against the window as though that’s going to help him see through the aggressively thorough tree cover.

“Welcome to Beacon Hills,” Boyd says, tightening his grip on the steering wheel so he doesn’t do the same to his voice. “Population: 7,000 lacrosse-obsessed assholes and more concealed carry permits than any other town in Beacon County.”

Stiles wakes up like a rodent; he’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now, even though he was unconscious and borderline comatose three minutes ago when Boyd had been blasting Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. “Smells like home,” he says cheerfully. “Also new car, yech.”

For the fifth time since they accepted this assignment, Boyd says, “It’s not my home, Stiles. My parents moved to Pasadena fifteen years ago.”

“Don't deny the truth in your heart,” Stiles says. “You miss it, I’m sure. The charming trees. Lots of grass. It’s really warming the cockles of my cold, barren heart.”

Instead of answering, Boyd raises the volume on the radio and listens to Rachmaninoff shift into Elgar. They’re both as familiar to him as the length of the road stretching towards town; when he’d lived in Beacon Hills, he’d listened to a lot of metal because it’d seem to fit with his general aura of unapproachability. At the house, though, his parents had very rarely turned off the classical public radio station. Boyd can’t picture their house on the edge of town without piano tinkling in the background, or the spitting cat noises that his littlest sister’s cello had made for the first two years that she’d learned to play.

Downtown Beacon Hills begins to fill up the front windshield of the rental SUV; it looks like a moderate amount of growth has taken place in the past seventeen years, but nothing that’s likely to have altered the substance of the town. They drive past three lacrosse outfitters and two hardware stores and then a diner with a hand-painted sign the window exclaiming that the Hurricanes have won their fifth consecutive state championship.

“Wow,” Stiles says, after he turns off the radio. “You weren’t kidding about the lacrosse thing, were you?”

“I don’t really exaggerate, Stiles,” Boyd says. “That’s you.”

“Me _ow_ ,” Stiles says, unoffended. “I’m sorry my verve and love of life is so horrifying to your sensibilities. Come here, baby, let me love you.”

Stiles flails octopus arms in Boyd’s direction and Boyd purposely swerves towards the sidewalk, letting the car to do his deflecting for him. “I don’t want to hug it out, Stiles,” he says, checking in the rearview mirror that he hasn’t swiped a mailbox or an old lady. He’s good, though; it’s nearing nine in the morning and Beacon Hills’ tiny commercial district is slowly waking up.

Boyd knows that he’s being more tightly wound than usual, but he’d sort of been looking forward to never seeing Beacon Hills again, except maybe on the ten o’clock news after the Earth’s crust had cracked open and accepted it back into hell. “Coffee?” he suggests as a peace offering.

“Do they accept U.S. currency here?” Stiles asks, pointedly staring at the front of Susan Philipson’s hair salon, where a goat is tied to a stop sign.

Just looking at the goat makes him feel creaky and ancient. It can’t be the same one, obviously, since Boyd highly doubts that crotchety bag of fleas survived seventeen years on top of the twelve it had already begrudgingly spent living it up on Penny Stocker’s farm, but it’s not like he’s seen goats tied to road signs anywhere else in the last two decades.

“It’s Penny Stocker’s,” he tells Stiles, reluctantly. “She won’t leave it at home in case it gets snatched.”

“Are goats often snatched in Beacon Hills?” Stiles asks with a look of horrified curiosity. “Are we dealing with some kind of goat-snatching artifact menace? Jesus, Boyd, where are you from? It’s like someone decided to blend _Gilmore Girls_ and _Supernatural_.”

“Teenagers, Stiles,” Boyd says, pulling into an open parking space in front of a Friendly’s. It’s new, which means entering it won’t make Boyd immediately revert to high school and therefore the ideal location for him and Stiles to regroup and consider their plan of action. “Teenagers steal farm animals. Aren’t you from the Midwest?”

“I’m from San Antonio, asshole,” Stiles replies. “It’s _civilized_.”

Because he’s thirty-three, Boyd is too mature to start bickering with his partner in the middle of Main Street about the relative culture of New Mexico versus northern California. He gets out of the car instead and slams the door behind him.

“What, no mom-and-pop diner establishment?” Stiles prods, following a half-step behind him. “Your lacrosse aversion can’t be so strong.”

Boyd opens the door and enters the Friendly’s, leaving Stiles to decide if he wants to eat breakfast alone or join Boyd. As long as Stiles isn’t mauled by whatever’s been terrorizing the villagers of Beacon Hills like something out of shitty 1980s Grimm made-for-TV adaptation, Boyd doesn’t really care where he eats breakfast.

As predicted, the inside of the Friendly’s is mostly empty and sad-looking, with lots of empty booths and a harried mother tending only three shrieking children, which is at least a dozen less than every other Friendly’s on the face of the planet.

“Just one?” the hostess asks, popping her gum.

“Two,” Stiles corrects, the bell on the door jangling with his entrance. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand wide open.” He grins at the hostess, who flushes and has to shuffle through her laminated menus to regain her composure. For someone who complains so frequently about his shitty dating history, Stiles seems to pick up female admirers at every town they investigate. Of course, they’re normally jailbait, but you’d think he’d be able to translate that skill to people his own age.

“I’ll be back with some coffee?” the hostess offers once she’s shown them to a booth. It’s clearly not her job, but Boyd isn’t going to rag her about wanting to linger. He doesn’t recognize her at all, which isn’t surprising; she probably wasn’t even alive when he’d last been in town.

That makes him feel depressingly old in conjunction with the goat thing, so he glances at the array of breakfast dishes and picks something with a lot of eggs instead of considering his life choices or something equally nauseating and maudlin.

“So,” Stiles says, slamming the menu shut and leaning forward, lacing his fingers together and resting them under his chin. “Wolves.”

“There’s only one documented wolf living in California,” Boyd promptly replies.

Stiles pouts slightly and then straightens when the waitress returns with two plastic glasses of water and a pot of burned-smelling coffee. They order and wait for her to clear out before Stiles says, “You stole my thunder.”

“You’ll get over it,” Boyd tells him drily. The coffee is indeed fairly burnt, but he dumps two little containers of half-and-half in it and reminds himself truthfully that the coffee at the ECTF offices in Birmingham had been far worse. “Did you read anything between the lines of Deaton’s briefing?”

“You know what Deaton’s like.” Stiles grimaces; it could be because of the coffee, but it’s probably their boss. “I read the file three times and it’s basically just a laundry list of the crimes that resulted in the spike that Erica picked up. Lots of animal attacks, a few cases of arson—all empty buildings—and what appears to be frankly shoddy police work. Whoever the hell Sheriff Hale is, he should probably be fired.”

Boyd remembers next to nothing about Derek Hale; he’s eight years older than Boyd and he and his sister had only been back in town for a year or two before Boyd had exited stage left for college and decided to never look back. “If an artifact’s involved, you can’t blame him for not knowing what to do,” Boyd says. He knows that Stiles gets touchy about the quality of police work, sort of like he gets touchy about the proper layering of a burrito and the “right” way to microwave popcorn, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect a sheriff of a sleepy California county to handle something like a chemical spill or an industrial disaster.

There are days where Boyd would actually prefer a chemical spill to some of the crazy shit that follows in the wake of an unregulated artifact.

“We’ve been to towns where they’re at least keeping their shit together,” Stiles says. He pushes a ubiquitous blue folder across the table towards Boyd; Deaton only really has one kind of office supplies stocked at the Warehouse. “Read this, it’s seriously major television network procedural levels of awful. It’s page after page of the cast of _CSI_ micropipetting things without putting a tip on first.”

Boyd ignores the folder. “I read the file on the plane.”

“And?” Stiles demands. “You’re really okay with this?”

“I don’t have to be okay with it,” Boyd reminds him. “Derek Hale is the sheriff of Beacon County. Neither of us are residents of Beacon County; judging his ability to do his job isn’t our responsibility.”

Stiles drags the folder back towards himself, grumbling into his coffee. “Derek Hale is going to _become_ our responsibility in about an hour,” he says, before promptly choking on his coffee. “Jesus Christ, Boyd, this is gross.”

“Live amongst the common men, Stiles,” Boyd advises him. “Not everywhere uses a French press.” The mother corrals her children and pushes them out the door; now that they’re nominally alone, Boyd reaches into the front pocket of his jacket and pulls out his Farnsworth. Stiles’ has been on the fritz; Erica had promised to look it over while they were gone, but it means Boyd dials the Warehouse and immediately has Stiles draped all over his left side like a pernicious species of clinging vine.

Erica answers; there’s a series of loud buzzes and then a spurt of static before she rolls her eyes and drawls, “Mooom, Isaac’s got his hands in the Umbilicus wiring again.”

“He probably shouldn’t do that if he wants to live to next Thursday,” Boyd says, and Erica leans back, slightly out of view of the Farnsworth’s camera, to repeat Boyd’s sentiment at three times the volume. Most of the time, the combined infantile powers of Stiles, Erica, and Isaac makes Boyd want to throw them all into the torture room and see who emerges—probably Erica; she’s the meanest—but right now he mostly just wants to get into his SUV and drive all the way back to South Dakota, preferably without seeing anyone with whom he’d graduated high school.

“So how’s the hometown?” Erica asks, appearing suddenly in a splash of blonde hair. “Stiles, you have a moral responsibility to learn every embarrassing thing you possibly can about Boyd’s formative years. Were you captain of the football team? I bet you were totally captain of the football team. Stiles, you have to find pictures of Boyd with a stupid high school football crew-cut, _I beg you_.”

“I wasn’t on the football team, Erica,” Boyd interrupts, before she and Stiles have a chance to get into one of their grooves. She hides it well with a combination of sarcasm and penetrant meanness, but Erica’s more than half in love with Stiles and it makes her bad at reeling him in whenever she riles him up.

Stiles says, “You are _harshing my worldview_ ,” and the hostess appears with two plates of eggs and hash browns and bacon. She looks sad about how Stiles is practically sitting in Boyd’s lap; to make her feel better and also because it’s funny, Boyd pinches Stiles’ side, right above where his button-down is tucked into his jeans. Stiles yelps and propels himself in the opposite direction, narrowly missing the hostess and their breakfast.

“Thanks,” Boyd tells her with a large smile, and she smiles back at him shyly, pushing his plate across the table towards him.

“You need anything else?” she asks. “More coffee?”

“Please, God, no,” Stiles says under his breath. He covers for this rudeness with a big grin, which seems to at least soothe any nerves ruffled by their waitress’ loyalty to her vocational franchise.

“I understand,” she says with a quiet giggle, although she’s fifteen, tops, and probably knows nothing about coffee except that it tastes great in ice cream form. She looks like the kind of person that Erica complains about whenever she gets back from a Starbucks run—one with a complicated frappuccino order that costs more than a gallon of gas.

Their waitress vanishes and Boyd puts the Farnsworth back on the table. “Have you managed to get any more information about what we’re looking for?”

Erica leans in so the only thing Boyd can see are her eyebrows, set up at what Stiles calls ‘crazy o’clock,’ and a determined, hardened glint in her eyes. “Your hometown is mad freaky, son. This isn’t the first time Beacon Hills has been graced with a severe animal problem. The same thing happened nineteen years ago.” Keys clack in the background and the Warehouse’s computer system hisses angrily. “Shh, baby, I know, Isaac’s a big meanie who doesn’t know to keep his hands to himself. Okay, so I’m emailing Stiles a list of casualties from nineteen years. It’s nothing too crazy, a couple of vagrants and a chick passing through town, except for this _one_ guy.”

Stiles’ phone makes an annoyingly high-pitched _clink_ and he thumbs open the email even as he continues shoveling eggs into his mouth. “Waffs wif him?” he asks through a mouthful of eggs.

“Gross,” Erica says, still typing. “Okay, get this, a _coma_ patient apparently got out of bed and walked four miles into the Beacon Hills Preserve all on his lonesome, only to be ripped in half by what the coroner initially reported to be a wolf.”

“ _Coma patient_?” Stiles says, at the same time Boyd says, “Initially?” He’s closer to the Farnsworth’s microphone, so presumably Erica can hear him better.

“Yeah, later on it got changed to mountain lion, but I’m in the M.E.’s files now and there’s an earlier draft that has the cause of death as _wolf attack_.” She frowns and her eyebrows wriggle closer together. “In fact, every animal attack from the spree nineteen years ago was eventually changed to mountain lion, regardless of what the coroner initially determined. It looks like some hotshot parent shot and killed a mountain lion in the high school parking lot and they determined that it was responsible for all of the deaths. The animal attacks at least cleared right up after it died.”

“You’re from this neck of the wood,” Stiles says, like Boyd really needs reminding when he can see Mrs. Delgado’s market across the street through the big front windows of Friendly’s. “In fact, you were _here_ nineteen years ago. You remember any of this?”

“I was a sophomore,” Boyd says. “Worked two jobs and kept my head down at school. Didn’t read the papers, didn’t really talk to people. I remember the mountain lion shooting, though; that was Allison Argent’s dad who took the shot, on the night of parent-teacher conferences. Thought the sheriff was going to chew his head right off about a civilian firing in a parking lot full of children.”

Stiles stops stuffing his face long enough to level Boyd with a no-nonsense look. It’s one that everyone in the Secret Service has to learn how to wield properly in a jurisdictional bitch-fight because nobody ever believes that the Secret Service has the best claim to a crime scene unless there’s a fainting dignitary two feet away.

“You got a lot of mountain lions around here that go into someone’s house, chew ’em up, and then light the house on fire?” he asks Boyd. He turns his phone so Boyd can see the article from the _Beacon Hills Daily Mirror_ that Erica’s sent. There’s a picture of a smiling blonde woman, inset a photo of the still-smoldering remains of the Hale house. Apparently the second fire had been too much for it; all that’s left in the photo is the shell of a staircase, leading up to nothing.

“They don’t exactly make smarter breeds of anything in California,” Boyd says. “Deaton give you any clues about what we might be looking for, Erica? Are we talking something like Harriet Tubman’s thimble here?”

“The thimble only lets the wearer take on the appearance of another person,” Erica says. Her typing becomes more frantic. “And, obviously, it’s in the Warehouse. I don’t know if we’ve got any rogue artifacts on file that can do animal shape-shifting, but I’ll take a look and get back to you.” She leans back so Boyd can finally see her whole face. She has her concentrating expression on, the one that she wears when she’s pulling at five threads to tighten them together.

“Sounds good,” Boyd says, and ends the call.

Stiles looks done—he’s mopping at a few stray flecks of bacon grease with a piece of white toast—so Boyd signals their waitress and she pops up with a smile and the bill.

“The sheriff still working out of the old town hall?” he asks her. She hasn’t given them wide berth for talking to what essentially looks like a steampunk Gameboy and she’s not blinking twice about the mess Stiles has managed to make, so she’s getting a big tip already, regardless of whether or not she knows where the sheriff’s office is.

“Sure is,” she says cheerfully. “Are you in town on official business with Sheriff Hale?” She half-sighs the sheriff’s name, which is unsurprising considering how Boyd’s classmates had reacted when Derek and Laura Hale had first come back to town his sophomore year.

“Yes we are,” Stiles says right back, just as cheerfully, as he climbs to his feet. “Have a good one.”

“You too!” she calls after them. Boyd doesn't really brood, at least not now that he’s over thirty and gets paid by the government to find wacky objects that he then has to dip in purple jelly to negate their hijinks-inspiring qualities; it doesn’t really work considering how ridiculous most of his days end up becoming. But being in Beacon Hills reminds him of when he did brood, usually while listening to ICP over the loudspeakers at the ice-skating rink while he worked the closing shift, and it’s not a pleasant state of being.

“Derek Hale and his sister grew up in town,” Boyd tells Stiles before they get into the truck. “Most of their family died in a big fire and they left town for about six years.”

“Jesus.” Stiles whistles through his teeth, which is something he picked up from an FBI agent in Tahoe. He can’t get away with doing it back at the Warehouse because Erica threatens to break his teeth when he does it. “I’m guessing that fires and mountain lions are the two biggest causes of death in Beacon Hills?”

Boyd opens the driver’s side door of the SUV instead of directly responding to Stiles’ comment; he rarely wants a response, anyway. “I’m mentioning it because they rolled back into town about nineteen years ago, and the coma patient who died in the woods was their uncle.”

“Well, I guess we need to,” here Stiles pauses while sliding on his sunglasses, “ _ask the sheriff a few personal questions_.” For someone who spends a significant portion of every road trip bitching about crime procedurals, Stiles seems to have an alarmingly vast repertoire of ways to imitate them.

Boyd briefly considers leaving him on the street with the goat, but he’s the senior field agent and he and Stiles work best within their experienced cop-immature asshole cop dynamic. “Get in the car, Stilinski,” he says instead.

~

When Boyd and Stiles had first been recruited to the Warehouse—Boyd out of the ECTF field office in Birmingham he’d been steadily taking over and Stiles out of the presidential body group in D.C.—Deaton had told them in his usual blank, barely-informational way that Warehouse agents were traditionally built as a team of two individuals with very different but highly compatible personalities.

In reality, Boyd and Stiles had spent the first six months as Warehouse agents trying not to kill each other; their success rate at that had been somewhere around 80%, although their case closure rate hovered at about 97%, which was apparently unprecedented and therefore hugely exciting. Not that they learned that from Deaton, of course, or Mrs. Frederick or the Regents. Erica, when she’d come on board a year later and compiled the statistics, had made a plaque for them and hung it up in the office.

Boyd suspects that she created the Employee(s) of the Month tradition solely to deny Isaac the privilege of earning it, but part of being a marine is thriving on feedback, either positive or negative, and seeing the plaques that Erica has the hardware store in downtown Univille mock up once a month does make him feel less like using an artifact to render Stiles temporarily or permanently mute.

So Boyd is under no illusions about how fucking annoying his partner is; three minutes into their interview with Sheriff Hale, when Stiles has managed to insult his knowledge of police procedure, his ability to handle the Smith & Wesson strapped to his hip, and the cleanliness of the sheriff’s office, Boyd puts a hand on Stiles’ shoulder and presses him backwards three steps.

Derek Hale looks like he’s seriously considering ripping Stiles’ throat out. For all that he’s a good-looking guy in his forties who clearly has Beacon Hills’ collection of busybody matrons eating out of his hand—judging by the number of casseroles Boyd had counted in the fridge in the lounge—he doesn’t seem to understand what charm is or how it works.

“Do you want to say that again?” he growls at Stiles, who snaps his teeth back at the sheriff like he’s five. Boyd actually has a five-year-old nephew, his sister Maria’s youngest, and Damian is about three times the gentleman that Stiles is, not to mention better dressed.

“Let’s take a breather,” Boyd suggests, although he’s well aware that he never really comes across as just _suggesting_ anything; when you’re 6’ 3” and a former marine, you can never really do anything but order for the rest of your life.

Hale clenches his teeth together and says, “Put a leash on your partner, Agent Boyd, and then maybe we’ll talk.”

Stiles opens his mouth and Boyd can actually see the ill-advised taunt about leashing mountain lions that’s just waiting to fall out. He digs his fingers into the flesh of Stiles’ shoulder and remarks, “I think we’re all fine. Thanks for being willing to help us out on this, Sheriff. Why don’t you walk us through what you know so far.”

Crossing his arms across his chest, Hale says, “Why don’t you tell me why the hell the Secret Service is interested in a couple of animal attacks, first off. This isn’t exactly a threat to the president and if it was a money thing I’d have the L.A. ECTF crawling up my ass about it.”

“Why don’t _you_ call us back when you get high enough security clearance to get the answer to that question?” Stiles also has a manner of speaking that makes suggestions not really suggestions, but it makes him sound petulant instead of authoritative.

Hale stops looking like he’s just thinking about eviscerating Boyd’s partner and actually shifts like he’s going to do something. Boyd lets go of Stiles’ shoulder and decides to let them get it out of their system. There’ve been a couple of lead detectives and FBI agents that Stiles has rubbed the wrong way in the past, and Boyd has found that things work out for the best if they yell at each other for a while straight off the bat instead of dragging it out over the course of the investigation.

Boyd drifts over to the corkboard behind Hale’s desk as Hale demands, “Are you seriously walking into _my_ town and telling me that you’re taking over _my_ investigation because it’s beyond my security clearance to know about a couple of mountain lion assaults? What are you, a fucking man in black, _Agent_ Stilinski?”

Stiles starts to say something rude about hicks that will probably turn out to be tangentially related to one of the MIB movies when the door to Hale’s office slams open and Lydia Martin, whom Boyd hasn’t seen in seventeen years and was honestly hoping had moved to L.A. to prevent him from fully reliving the entirety of his humiliating high school existence, stomps in on a pair of shoes with a heel so tall even Erica would be afraid of wearing them.

“Derek, what the _hell_ happened to my car?” she shouts. She looks momentarily surprised that Hale has company, but after two seconds she clearly dismisses both Stiles and Boyd as unimportant. Boyd can tell; even if it doesn’t leave the same hot lick of shame down his spine that it had when he was fourteen, basically mute, and desperately in love with her, it leaves a hot lick of something.

Hale actually shrinks minutely back from her before he seems to remember that she’s half his size, even with all of that braided hair piled on top of her head. “Dr. Martin, I’m currently in the middle of—”

“I seriously could not care less about what you’re in the middle of,” she tells him. “You get Deputy Greenberg into your office and explain to him that if he ever even _thinks_ to touch the side of my car with a patrol bicycle ever again, he’s paying for the new paint job.”

It’s nice to know that in addition to Penny Stocker’s goat, Michael Greenberg is still an idiot and the entirety of Beacon Hills still revolves around Lydia Martin.

“I can’t deal with your car right now, Lydia,” Hale hisses. “Go yell at _Greenberg_ yourself. He can probably hear you from here.”

As if Hale hasn’t spoken, Lydia continues, “There is a dent in the side of my car the size of human being, Derek Hale, and if you don’t find me Michael Greenberg and his goddamn menace of a fixie, I am going to make life in this station miserable for everyone inside of it, starting with you.”

If there were times that Boyd misses living in a small town—there aren’t—now would probably be one of them. Watching Lydia Martin, who uses her IQ like other people use fingernails, rip apart an authority figure is something Boyd hasn’t seen in years, but he finds himself enjoying the spectacle just as much as he had the first day of AP Calculus their senior year of high school when she had corrected Mr. Devine’s solution to an integral with a snotty, “You _do_ know how trigonometry works, don’t you?”

But just because Boyd, along with about forty of the boys and twelve of the girls he’d graduate from high school with, had occasionally daydreamed about going to prom with Lydia Martin seventeen years ago doesn’t mean he appreciates her interfering with his case now. “I’m sorry, Dr. Martin,” he interrupts, “but we’re just about finishing up here. If you give us a minute?”

Even though she’s thirty-five, Lydia’s eyes rocket heavenward and then comes back down to rest on him; she’s wearing a gauzy blouse tucked into a pencil skirt, all the better to accentuate her hips as she cocks one to the side. “Excuse me, mister—”

“Agent Boyd, ma’am,” Boyd takes great delight in saying. “Secret Service.”

He doesn’t expect her to remember him—she doesn’t seem to, she just turns on her heel and exits Hale’s office in a series of precise _clicks_ —but the pleasure doesn’t come from that. Boyd’s a grown man and he doesn’t need the validation of his former peers for the development of his psyche or whatever his sister Frances might call it in her preferred psychological analysis lingo of the week. But it sure does feel nice, looking at Lydia Martin and informing her that he works for the Secret Service.

It’s not the Wolf Prize, but it’s something.

~

There’s a pretty little convertible parked in front of the BCPD building with a fairly sizable dent in the passenger side. “Ouch,” says Stiles with an exaggerated wince. He has a borderline unhealthy relationship with his Jeep, which he not only took with him from San Antonio to D.C. when he was assigned to the president but also had shipped to South Dakota when they were reassigned to the Warehouse. After five years, Boyd still doesn’t have all of the CDs that were theoretically going to be sent after him, but Stiles has his damn wreck of a car.

Boyd says, before Stiles has a chance to breeze past, “Does that dent look a little deep for a bicycle cop to have just walked away from the scene?”

Stiles pauses and reconsiders, which for him necessitates stroking his chin. “I mean, I’m not the physicist here, but common sense would say yes, that is a very valid point. If Greenface survived that collision, he either has a spine of steel or doesn’t have one at all, like a snake.”

“Greenberg,” Boyd corrects him absently. He drops into a squat by the side of the car and tries to see if there’s anything in the way of fiber evidence trapped in the door or along the undercarriage of the car. No dice, as Stiles would say, but Boyd takes the chance while he’s there to measure the breadth of his shoulders against the indentation. “Let’s take a picture of this to send to Erica. Unless Mike grew a foot and started taking steroids, I don’t think he caused this. She’ll be able to confirm height, maybe weight of whatever landed here.”

Stiles obligingly snaps a bunch of pictures with his phone and emails them to Erica. “Remember when we didn’t have her on the other end of the Farnsworth, and we had to ask Deaton to do this stuff?” Stiles looks up at Boyd and, clutching his phone to his chest, says in a deep and rather poor imitation of Deaton’s monotone, “Agents do their own field work. The Warehouse computer network is to be used on a support basis only. You have to be able to operate without a safety net.” Stiles drops the voice. “Jesus, like what, we’re supposed to goo everything that looks vaguely suspicious and hope something sparks eventually?”

“Isn’t that what we end up doing anyway?” Boyd points out, and Stiles laughs and shoots finger guns at him, which is not the _most_ annoying thing Stiles does but ranks fairly highly.

“Fair point, mi amigo, fair point,” Stiles says. “So, since Sheriff Hale turned out to be just another pretty face with the personality of a rabid pit bull, why don’t we put further stress on our already shitty relationship with the local law enforcement and head out to see one of surviving victims? He’s supposed to be just out of the hospital.”

Boyd tosses Stiles the Farnsworth over the hood of the car as he unlocks the doors. “Call Erica for an address. See if you can charm her into getting through the analysis of Dr. Martin’s car as quickly as possible.”

~

The surviving victim is Jackson Whittemore. He’d been a bit of a jackass in high school, but only to the people who actually registered on his social radar—the second line of the lacrosse team, people who had lockers on either side of his, freshmen who didn’t learn to stop staring at Lydia Martin before he noticed them doing it—so he doesn’t recognize Boyd, either, which means that this entire trip is shaping up.

Framed against the front door of his massively oversized McMansion, he asks, “Can I help you?” in a way that makes it clear he has no intention of being helpful at all.

“Agents Stilinski and Boyd, Secret Service,” Stiles says, flashing his badge in concert with a beaming smile. “Morning, Mr. Whittemore. We just have a couple of questions about your recent run-in with the local wildlife.”

“Great,” Jackson says. “You enjoying having them.” He moves to shut the door, but Boyd rests his palm against it and there’s no way in hell that door is moving without his express permission. “If you would call off your _goon_ , Agent Chilinski, it would be much appreciated.”

“Stilinski,” Stiles corrects. His smile features more teeth now than it did a second ago; even though his sunglasses are hiding his eyes, Boyd can tell that there’s a ruthless tint of excitement to them. Stiles loves baiting bitchy witnesses. “I’m afraid Agent Boyd doesn’t appreciate being called a goon, Mr. Whittemore, and the United States government doesn’t really take kindly to it either.”

Boyd only has to exert a little bit of pressure to make the door open further in Jackson’s direction. He might’ve been the captain of the lacrosse team seventeen years ago, but he’s still half a foot shorter than Boyd.

“Oh, thanks, we’d love to come in,” Stiles says. “Agent Boyd, after you.”

“No,” Boyd says, “after you, Agent Stilinski.”

Stiles mimes taking off a nonexistent hat and then he steps cheerfully into the foyer of Jackson’s house, which is just as overblown and pasty-white as Jackson himself. Stiles stuffs his hands into his pockets, rocks back on his heels, and whistles. “Now this is a _nice_ place, Mr. Whittemore.”

Personally, Boyd finds it hideous, but his tastes haven’t ever really run to marble floors and dangerous-looking contemporary light fixtures. Boyd favors antiques and the Arts & Crafts movement, but it mostly looks like Jackson Whittemore’s a fan of things that are expensive and made of glass. For a moment, Boyd finds himself wondering how the hell Jackson ever justifies putting anything on a side table that is made entirely of chrome—it must get dirty if you look at it—and then he remembers that Jackson’s always been stupid about his possessions.

“Well, now that I have your approval,” Jackson says. “What the hell do you want.”

He has his arms folded across his chest and his legs spread slightly further than shoulder-width apart; it’s defensive posturing, basically textbook, and thanks to Jackson’s taste in closely-tailored designer clothing, Boyd can immediately tell that whatever injuries he’d gotten that had landed him in the hospital are no longer bandaged.

“Like I said,” Stiles replies, now looking over the top of his sunglasses at a frankly horrifying mural hanging above the chrome table, “we have a few questions for you about your new buddy.” He jerks a thumb at the painting and raises an eyebrow at Boyd. “Art, amirite? Total mystery. I’m a complete Philistine myself.”

You don’t have to be a Philistine to hate whatever disaster’s up on the wall—it looks like Gorky and de Kooning got into a cat fight and Frank Frazetta won—but Jackson gets a sour, superior look on his face and says, “As much as I’d love to run you through the intricacies of the abstract expressionist movement, I actually don’t give a fuck about what you think about my art collection.”

Stiles pushes his sunglasses back up his nose and says, neutrally now, “Well, that’s a relief. Want to talk about your run-in at the Beacon Hills Preserve, then?”

“I was out running, I was bitten by a mountain lion, I ended up in the hospital.” For someone who spent most of his adolescence drama queening like no one else had dibs on being the Draco Malfoy of Beacon Hills High School, Jackson seems surprisingly uninterested in elaborating beyond that. Boyd would be willing to chalk that up to a shift in Jackson’s maturity level, except that he’s fairly certain from that way that Jackson’s house is decorated that he hasn’t changed at all.

“By a mountain lion, eh?” Stiles prods. “What time were you out there? You don’t really strike me as an early riser.”

“It was during my lunch break,” Jackson says. “I’m a lawyer. You should remember that, in case you do something stupid and I end up suing you and the government for _wasting my time_.”

Stiles waits six or seven seconds before saying flatly, “We’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Whittemore.” He mirrors Jackson’s pose, leaning back to brace himself on the banister leading up to the upper story, before he continues, “Weird time of day for a mountain lion attack.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jackson bites out. “Do I look like some kind of expert to you?”

“Maybe,” Boyd says. As the level-headed partner, he should probably find Stiles’ antics less hilarious, but this is the best he’s felt since he boarded the plane in South Dakota.

“Yeah, maybe, I can see that,” Stiles agrees. “Interesting that you managed to get away, too. I mean, you’re fighting for your _life_ against a mountain lion, as the, what, twelve people who’ve died in the last year can attest?”

“Eleven,” Boyd says, although that’s not true either—they have eleven suspicious deaths on their list, but only seven were tagged as animal attacks.

He’s glad Stiles has chosen to go in this direction; Jackson blanches and then tries to hide it by angrily clearing his throat and saying, “I’m not exactly easy prey.”

“Right, yeah,” Stiles says agreeably, “I can see that. You clearly work out. You bench, what, one-sixty, one-seventy?”

Jackson finally snaps, which had taken longer than Boyd had expected, considering that both he and Stiles are still wearing their sunglasses. “If you don’t get out of my house right now, I’m going to call your supervisor and make sure that by the end of the week both of you are wearing visors and shuffling mail between cubicles in _Boise_.”

“Oh, we don’t want to keep you,” Stiles replies instantly, faux-solicitously. “We’ll show ourselves out. Have a nice day, Mr. Whittemore.” Stiles even takes the joy of slamming the door behind them away from Jackson; he closes it quietly as they step out onto the porch.

Boyd waits until they’re in the SUV and halfway down the road before he starts laughing; he has to pull over because he can’t stop. Hardly better, Stiles is a mess in the passenger seat. “Oh god, his _face_ ,” he wheezes. “That guy is one hell of a loose end. He clearly knows everything that’s going on. If I was the mastermind of this fiasco, he’d be dead _yesterday_.”

“We’ll need to watch him,” Boyd says. The laughter’s mostly died down, but every time he thinks of Jackson pouting impotently under his ugly mural it rises up again. “You should dial Erica, see if she’s gotten anything from Dr. Martin’s car.”

“Hello, sad mortals,” Erica answers. The gearshift is uncomfortably digging into Boyd’s side, but there’s only so many ways to get both his and Stiles’ faces into the Farnsworth’s camera and this way necessitates the least amount of whining from Stiles. “Are you prepared to worship me yet? I’ll give you a few seconds, to ready yourselves.”

“Dollface, I’m always ready to worship you,” Stiles promises, and Erica beams.

“Two for you, Glen Coco. You wanted to know about the doctor’s car? Whatever hit it definitely has a human’s weight distribution pattern. I’m going to put them between five-ten and six-three, and weight’s around two, two-twenty, depending on how hard they were being thrown. Realistically, then, you’re looking for someone male and pretty muscular. Also, someone whose back should definitely be broken in like two places.”

“Have you checked hospitals?” Stiles asks. “ERs, what have you?”

“I’m not a moron,” Erica says. “Nobody complaining of a broken back has checked into any hospital in the surrounding hundred miles. Either they’re dead—which is most likely, I’d guess—or they managed to walk away from that.”

“Jackson Whittemore was almost or completely healed from whatever put him in the hospital a week ago,” Boyd says. “Are we looking at some kind of shape-shifting artifact with healing properties?”

Erica grins. “I love double search terms. I ran up a list of animal-shifting artifacts; I’ll cross-reference for known healing properties and get back to you with whatever comes up.”

Before she can shut down her Farnsworth, Isaac’s head appears in the foreground. “Stay safe!” he adds. “In light of the fact that something is throwing people into cars with enough force to break their backs, maybe you should make sure the Tesla is fully-charged before you play heroes.”

“Aw, Isaac, I didn’t know you cared,” Stiles coos.

“I don’t care about you,” Isaac replies. “I care about Boyd. If your back breaks, Erica gets promoted to field agent and I get her job. It’s a win all around as far as I’m concerned.”

“It’s like we’re one, big, hypercompetitive family,” Stiles says. “I love you. Kiss kiss to the kiddies.”

“Fuck you,” Erica says, and her laughter is cut off by the static of the closed connection.

“They’re growing up so fast,” Stiles sniffles at Boyd. “I remember when they were little snot-nosed brats, fished right out of Deaton’s security network like flies in a web. Look at them now. Growing ambitions. Wanting to be _field agents_.”

Boyd is fairly certain that neither of them want to be field agents; Erica just uses that fact that she’s apprenticing Deaton, while Isaac is apprenticing Scott, who runs the B&B in Univille, as a way to make Isaac feel inferior. It’s a sacred duty of older sisters; Boyd knows, as he has two.

“It’s late enough now that we can check into our hotel,” Boyd points out. “Lunch and regroup?”

“I thought you’d never suggest food and I’d starve,” Stiles admits. “Lead on, MacBoyd. And can we please not eat at _Friendly’s_ this time? I know I have intestines of steel but I’m pretty sure Superman would get the runs after hitting that place twice in one day.”

Boyd says blandly, “I know a place,” and he hopes it’s just as much of a hole-in-the-wall as it used to be.

~

It’s not.

Mrs. Jameson is almost twenty years older than the last time he saw her, but she _beams_ when she sees him and Stiles come in from the parking lot. “Vernon Boyd!” she calls out. “Look at you!” All of the tiny tables—there are more of them than there used to be—behind her are occupied, but only the ones in the very front look up at the noise.

“Hey, Mrs. J,” says Boyd, leaning down so she can give him a hug. She must be close to sixty now, but she can still fit her arms strongly around his neck. “How have you been?”

“Well, my day’s looking up now,” she says. “Indy, get over here, look who it is.”

Dr. Kalpak is seated at her usual table with Lydia Martin, who seems harassed and unwilling to look confused. “For fuck’s sake, Betty, let the boy breathe.”

“Look at him, he’s breathing just fine.”

Boyd lets go of Mrs. Jameson to lean over an interfering potted ficus and wrap Dr. Kalpak in a similarly fierce hug. “How’s it going, Dr. K?”

When he straightens, she reaches up to run her fingers along the outside of his face. “I was going to say ‘well,’ but now that I look at you it’s clear I’ve been getting the short end of the stick for the past seventeen years. I didn’t think you could _get_ bigger, for fuck’s sake.”

To his left, Mrs. Jameson says, “They always get bigger when they go off to school. Usually it’s because of too much pizza.”

“You’re one to talk,” Dr. Kalpak points out. “He got plenty of pizza here. How did school go, raasa?”

“You hightailed it out of here like a bat out of hell— _not_ that I blame you,” Mrs. Jameson adds.

“It was nice,” Boyd tells them. He hasn’t talked about school in so long that he’s honestly blank for a second. “If it hadn’t been for your letter of recommendation I don’t think MIT would’ve taken me, Dr. K.”

“Pfft, with your test scores?” Mrs. Jameson runs her hand down his arms and squeezes his elbow, waggling it gently. “I think the deans of Oxford would’ve come crawling out of their crypts to take you.”

“Thank fuck that wasn’t an issue,” Dr. Kalpak says. “You wouldn’t’ve liked Oxford, Vernon, too many old ideas festering in poorly-lit buildings. Besides, you joined NROTC, didn’t you?”

Boyd’s honestly impressed that she remembers something he mentioned in passing in a thank-you card, but it makes sense that the afternoons with Mrs. Jameson and Dr. Kalpak had meant just as much to them as it had to him. “Yeah. I did my time in the marines after graduation.”

“I still can’t believe it,” Mrs. Jameson says, tsking her tongue. “ _Four_ sisters. What were your parents thinking? We just have the one and I want to kill her more days than not.”

“I don’t think they were,” Boyd tells her, grinning. “They’re in love, Mrs. J, what can I say? Besides, Mom timed every kid for a grant so the department chair couldn’t kick up a fuss about it.”

Dr. Kalpak leans back in her rickety rattan chair and gestures to Boyd’s suit. “That doesn’t look like a uniform to me. Are you still serving, or did you go back to get your PhD? We’ve had good money on this for close to twenty years, and you would not _believe_ the interest it’s accrued.”

“He’s in the Secret Service,” Lydia Martin cuts in. “None of the above.”

“Oh, you know each other?” Dr. Kalpak looks uncommonly pleased. “My two best students, Betty. Same year, even, which goes to show that the last twenty years have been nothing but a rapid descent into mediocrity.”

“No,” Lydia and Boyd say at the same time, Boyd pleasantly and Lydia in a huff through her nose.

“Agent Boyd was in Derek’s office this morning when I went to register a complaint about my car,” Lydia explains. Boyd has never seen her be so obliging in his life; maybe she has the same soft spot for Dr. Kalpak that he does. It would be hard not to, once you’re on her good side.

“Ooh, _Agent_ Boyd,” Mrs. Jameson says. “Well, he’s not a doctor so I won anyways but that sure sounds nice. Secret Service is a bit of a jump from the marines, isn’t it?”

Someone behind her says, aggrieved, “Can we get a _table_?”

“Be quiet and hold your horses,” Mrs. Jameson hisses, “can’t you see a body’s trying to have a bit of a catch-up?”

“You bet about the doctorate?” Boyd asks Dr. Kalpak. His parents had taken it for granted that he’d go back to school; when he’d applied for NROTC, they’d been disappointed but understanding—MIT didn’t exactly come cheaply, and even with two full faculty appointments, five children weren’t going to go to college without some kind of external support. They had not, however, expected him to join the Secret Service and his mother still makes pointed comments about his lack of a PhD over dinner when he made it to Pasadena, which has become a less frequent occurrence since he joined the Warehouse and started working a job that doesn’t come with vacation days.

“Of course I did,” Dr. Kalpak snaps. “You told me you’d get me my first Wolf Prize. I have a spot for it in my trophy case.” She turns her beady stare onto Lydia and pokes the back of her hand where it’s resting against the base of her glass of water. “You still owe me a Fields, Martin.”

“In the works,” Lydia drawls. Her hair is up today, so she can’t accompany it with her trademark hair-flip; Boyd is almost disappointed.

“Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the Wolf,” Boyd says. He smiles and holds up his palms when Dr. Kalpak’s hard look focuses on him.

“You can have his Navy Cross,” Stiles suggests from over Boyd’s right shoulder. “It’s not like he’s using it for anything. It’s literally sitting in his sock drawer in a box.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Boyd asks. “It’s in that drawer for a _reason_ , Stiles.”

“What can I say, I’m an incurable snoop with no sense of personal space. Hi, I’m Stiles Stilinski, I’m Boyd’s partner. Nice to meet you.” He shakes both Mrs. Jameson and Dr. Kalpak’s hand and smiles across the table at Lydia. “Good to see you again, Dr. Martin, and no longer quite so incensed.”

“Work partner or life partner?” Dr. Kalpak asks. Boyd is glad she does; Mrs. Jameson, to judge by her rapturous face, has already assumed the latter.

“Oh, Boyd’ll saddle himself to a lifetime of me on a cold day in hell,” Stiles says cheerfully. “Work partners and friends. I’m too much man for Vernon,” he adds as he slings his arm around Boyd’s shoulders.

“Call me that again,” Boyd suggests.

“Right,” Stiles says, withdrawing his arm. “Sorry, Boyd.”

“Not married, then?” Mrs. Jameson says sadly. “You’re such a charming boy, Vernon, so nice and so helpful. If you want to have children and enjoy playing with them without a hernia, you’re going to need to get started on that pretty soon.”

“I’ve got enough nieces and nephews to convince me I don’t need kids in my life,” Boyd assures her. “My sisters are certain that unless their children have at least two siblings they’re going to grow up cold and unsociable.”

“Hey, I’m an only child and I turned out fine,” Stiles says.

Boyd smirks at him. “For a relative value of _fine_.”

“Well, sit down,” Dr. Kalpak says suddenly. “Betty, those people at the front look like they’re nearly at sixes and sevens. Raasa, go get us two more chairs from the closet by the loo, you remember where they are, don’t you? Things haven’t moved around, they’ve just gotten more compressed.”

Boyd does indeed remember where the extra chairs are kept; he’d worked for Mrs. Jameson for all of high school, and even after he’d taken a second job at the ice rink to burn some of the extra time lingering around his day, he’d still enjoyed doing his homework at the pizzeria while Mrs. Jameson and Dr. Kalpak heckled each other over the accounts.

When he comes back with two chairs and two more sets of plastic water glasses and knives and forks rolled in napkins, Stiles is half-crouched to Dr. Kalpak’s right, which leaves Boyd sandwiched in next to Lydia Martin.

“Sorry for interrupting your lunch,” he says to her in an undertone, slipping beneath whatever Stiles is chattering at Dr. Kalpak about. It sounds like his anecdote about the lemmings at the Baltimore Zoo; it’s a funnier anecdote when you include the bit about how much time it had taken Stiles to get the lead lemming to actually put the artifact into the neutralizer, but that’s a Warehouse staff-only detail.

“Who am I to stand in the way of the return of the prodigal marine,” Lydia murmurs. If she’s being mocking, it’s hard to tell; although her words are unambiguously sharp, her voice is soft and she’s smiling faintly. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“Neither did anyone else until now,” Boyd says. “I wasn’t very noticeable.”

Lydia shrugs and runs a fingernail along one of the exposed tines of her fork. “I suppose,” she says tonelessly. She seems to be conflicted about something; Boyd can tell by the way she jerks at the end of the fork, as if she’s surprised that the tine ends. He’s never seen Lydia Martin conflicted about anything in his life.

“How have you been?” Boyd asks politely. Stiles is getting to the climax of the lemming story, where he can keep it hovering indefinitely depending upon the mood of his audience. Both Mrs. Jameson and Dr. Kalpak look enthralled.

“Fine,” Lydia says. She drops her hand and clenches it around the paper napkin holder. “Great. I’m on sabbatical from Caltech for the semester, working at home on a grant proposal.” She pauses, and then deliberately, slowly lifts her napkin and begins to unwrap the napkin holder. “I presume that I don’t need to define those terms for you?” Her smile at the end should relieve the bite to her words, but it’s the kind that cuts like her red of her lipstick.

“That’s true,” Boyd says. “Good luck with your grant.”

Lydia’s smile has just the right amount of teeth this time. “I don’t operate on a luck-based system.”

“Lucky you,” Boyd tells her, and she laughs—this time it isn’t deliberate; he can tell because it’s a hair too loud and she looks annoyed with herself. “It’s usually when Mom is grant-writing that Dad decides to see if praying is going to work any better this time around.”

“That’s why I live alone,” Lydia says. “When I lived with—when I was married, I used to want to stab my husband in the throat when he interrupted me while I was writing.” Lydia Martin had never been a particularly big fan of failure, especially her own; Boyd can see that she wants to talk about her marriage to Jackson Whittemore about as much as Boyd wants to talk about his experiences at Beacon Hills High School.

At some point, Boyd will have to talk to Lydia in an official capacity about Jackson’s miraculous recovery, but he finds himself unwilling to bring it up now, when Lydia is looking at him instead of through him and her hair, braided around her head like a crown, glows faintly under the sunlight filtering in through the front windows.

“That’s how Stiles gets sometimes on a case,” he says instead, and even though he’s never spoken more than five words to Lydia Martin before this day, he finds himself telling her the story of Stiles’ first and only attempt at working a case without coffee. Boyd has never been particularly loquacious, but Lydia’s face is surprisingly mobile and engaging; when she laughs for reasons beyond mere politeness, her eyes turn into small slits and her mouth becomes pink and open.

Mrs. Jameson looks flushed with delight; Dr. Kalpak looks like she might be plotting something. Stiles’ mouth is half full of pizza and half full of Diet Coke. Boyd isn’t really sure what this lunch has become, but he’s fairly certain that it’s not really a catching-up-with-old-friends kind of meal anymore. He doesn’t really care; Lydia says something mean to Stiles about his eating habits and Boyd smiles into his pizza so Stiles doesn’t kick him for being unsupportive.

~

“Why,” Stiles says later that afternoon, “am I not surprised that you were the pseudo-adopted physics wunderkind of a pair of lesbians that own a pizzeria?”

“Yeah,” Erica says, “why aren’t you? _I’m_ surprised.”

“So am I,” Isaac adds. “I would’ve said football captain. Maybe something like secret chess club president to add depth and explain why you always win at Risk, but I wouldn’t have called the pizzeria.”

Boyd pins the driver’s license photo of another victim from the spree nineteen years ago to the window of his hotel bedroom and ignores both Stiles and the Farnsworth. He steps back, makes sure that the photos are all level, and reaches for the last of the victim photos. He’s almost out of tape; Stiles likes to make little balls and throw them around the room because it “helps him think.”

From his position on the bed, where he’s halfway through a package of Twizzlers and theoretically touching base with Erica, Stiles opines, “I mean, the fact that you know how to cook makes sense now.”

“I know how to cook because I’m a grown-ass man and my father taught me,” Boyd says irritably. “The real mystery here is why you _don’t_ know how to cook.”

“We live at the B&B and Scott’s pancakes are seriously like the most delicious things on the face of the planet,” Stiles says blankly. “Why would I need to know how to cook?”

“Because you lived by yourself until you were, like, thirty?” Erica suggests. “Whatever, I don’t want to hear about the fifty miraculous ways you can use shit from a can to make ramen more palatable.” Stiles visibly deflates. “The Warehouse archives came up blank for any artifacts that have healing properties and animal shape-shifting.”

“What about just the shifting?” Boyd asks, taping a lower corner of the last photo.

“That’s fifteen hits,” Erica says, “but most of them are obviously not related—you know, that Moliere script that turns people into fieldmice, stuff like that. Nothing about mountain lions or wolves.”

“You do realize that we’ve been leaving an entire avenue of thought unturned here.” Stiles pauses dramatically and waits until Boyd turns towards him. “ _Werewolves_.”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Isaac says.

Erica adds, “Yeah, we’re done here,” and ends the connection.

“Boyd, Boyd, listen to me, trust me, this is nothing like that vampire thing in Silver Springs.” Stiles has both hands held up imploringly, but he has Twizzlers splayed between his fingers so it’s difficult to take him seriously.

“You say that every time you come up with an improbable theory about what’s going on,” Boyd points out. He figures that Stiles will keep talking regardless of whether or not he’s looking at him, so Boyd returns most of his attention to his makeshift whiteboard and folds his arms across his chest.

“No—well, yeah, okay, but I’m right at least 60% of the time so this is important. Werewolves totally make sense. People are getting attacked by wolves, but _there are no wolves in California_.”

“Except the one,” Boyd says.

“Yeah, yeah, except the one. People are being attacked, local law enforcement’s covering it up—you said it yourself, Jackson Whittemore was in the hospital a week ago and now he’s all great and stuff? That’s classic werewolf mythos. He was bitten by the beast, and how he’s one of them!”

Boyd wants to put his head in his hands the second the word ‘beast’ slips excitedly out of Stiles’ mouth, but he tightens his arms and frowns at his photo-display instead. “Do we have any connections between these ones that are obvious hired thugs?” There are seven of them clustered under the current deaths and twelve from the spate nineteen years ago; years of experience has given Boyd the ability to look at their ID photos and tell which ones have had a mug shot taken.

“Not all of them, but we can probably extrapolate. Hale hasn’t put anything remotely approaching a known associates together for this case, but his predecessor wasn’t a total moron, gimme a sec.” There’s shuffling and a muffled squeak from the bed, and then, “Yeah, looks like they mostly hung around each other—surprise, surprise—and, oh, wow, lookie here, Gerard Argent.”

Stiles comes up next to Boyd flourishing an ID photo identical to the one currently pinned to the window. “Looks like Gramps had quite the number of friends in low places. All of them have either him or Kate Argent—she’s our blonde, the one who was killed by the arsonist mountain lion—listed. Was there word on the street about the Argents being up to hinky shit when you were a kid?”

“If there was, I didn’t hear it.” Boyd doesn’t really like the look of either Gerard or Kate Argent; they’ve got hard, military bearings and there’s a flare of cruelty in their eyes, which are almost identical. “Either of them serve?”

“Nada on Katherine Angelica, but looks like Gramps was a Green Beret.” Stiles jostles Boyd’s shoulder lightly. “Good call, pardner.”

“It would be a pretty stupid coincidence that Chris Argent’s sister and father died and his shooting a scapegoat mountain lion was totally unrelated,” Boyd points out.

“Not that we don’t get stupid coincidences occasionally, but yeah, I get you. Looks like Chris Argent has a pretty clean record; mostly speeding tickets and one reckless driving charge that got dropped. He’s retired now, living outside Tucson with the wife. His daughter’s the only Argent still making her way through the world. Allison, thirty-six, keeping up her daddy’s arms-supplying business.” Stiles looks up and grins at Boyd’s reflection in the only blank patch of window that remains. “Looks like she’s staying in town, no less. The Renaissance on Hudson.”

“Classy,” Boyd says.

“It’d be nice if the Regents would shell out for something like a Renaissance occasionally,” Stiles says wistfully. “Not that I don’t appreciate the stylings of Motel 6, but I’m starting to think that hell is going to smell like those little bottles of complimentary shampoo.”

“Mm,” says Boyd, noncommittal and no longer paying much attention. “Do you have an exact date for when the Argents came to town nineteen years ago?”

“They took their house the first week of February, so probably in late January. Why, what are you thinking? Boyd, silent brooding is bad for your health.”

“Peter Hale was the first victim,” Boyd says. “His body was found the morning of January 31st. Allison’s aunt died in late February, and her grandfather in April. I think the remaining Argents were out of town by May. There weren’t any deaths past May.”

“Shit,” Stiles says. He drops half of the file in his hands and kicks it aside, wading forward to read the date underneath the first arson death. “Allison Argent rolled into town five weeks ago, and two days later the first arson death was reported. You think she might have our artifact?”

“Stupid coincidences aren’t that frequent, Stiles,” Boyd says. “For the record, Allison Argent and Lydia Martin were best friends. They might’ve lost touch after she moved, but the three of them were practically inseparable—Lydia Martin, Allison Argent, and Jackson Whittemore.”

“Holy crap,” Stiles says. “This is _Heathers_ , isn’t it? We’re officially investigating a werewolf AU of _Heathers_.”

Boyd doesn’t know what the hell Stiles means, because Boyd has actual taste in movies, but he can tell that it’s the kind of comment that Stiles would like someone to acknowledge. For that reason, he ignores it. “We need to talk to Allison Argent.”

“ _Werewolves_ ,” Stiles whispers under his breath, obviously enthused. “Oh my god, this is officially the best case we’ve ever had. Even better than Charles Dana Gibson’s pen, and I honestly never thought I’d see a case that would surpass an artifact that literally turned every person who touched it into a supermodel.”

“Stiles,” Boyd says.

“Right,” Stiles says. “Shutting up and getting in the SUV.”

~

The number one thing that Boyd spends his time doing as a Warehouse agent is lying to local law enforcement officials. Closely following behind that is tracking down false leads; artifacts rarely drop into their laps, helpfully emitting some kind of detectable electrical impulse, just as they put together the right pieces.

That said, when Boyd parks outside the Renaissance on Hudson Street, two blocks south of what passes for the main shopping drag of Beacon Hills, the entire left wing of the building is on fire and Allison Argent is standing in the front stoop, a shotgun in her hands, taking aim at Sheriff Hale.

Stiles says, “This doesn’t seem too easy to you, does it?” and without looking, Boyd reaches over and smacks the back of his head. “Right, sorry, no jinxing. Shall we?”

Boyd unsheathes his Tesla as he climbs out of the car and he can see Stiles reaching for his Beretta to his right. Even if they only have one Tesla to go around, Stiles is perfectly willing to shoot people with normal bullets if the situation calls for it. That, along with his unflagging appreciation of irony, is enough to make Boyd forgive the rest of Stiles’ personality defects.

Outside of the SUV, the front parking lot of the Renaissance is shockingly quiet, considering that half of the building is on fire. Allison looks tougher than she had in high school; her hair is cut into a short cap and she’s wearing dark, serviceable clothing—denim and leather, hiking boots, and a thick silver pendant on a long black cord. After his second year with the Warehouse, Boyd began to develop a sixth sense about artifacts, and he’s certain the moment that he lays eyes on it that Allison Argent’s necklace is what they’re looking for. _How_ the hell it works is Deaton’s job; Boyd and Stiles just have to snag, bag, and tag.

“You might want to stay back,” Allison says loudly, too tightly to be as casual as she might want to come across. Before Boyd has time to parse what that’s supposed to mean—is she referring to the building it looks like she set on fire? Because, as Stiles would say, that’s kind of hideously obvious—she shoots Hale in the chest.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Stiles barks, and Hale takes two stumbling steps backwards, spine bowing into a hard curve, before he bounces back like he wasn't just slammed with a shotgun shell, his eyes icily blue, the planes of his face shifting under his skin.

He opens his mouth and it’s filled with teeth, pointed like a cat’s, and the noise that emerges is long and threatening. “I am _not fighting you_ , Argent,” he growls. The fact that as he says that his fingernails shift into wicked-looking claws seems to negate this statement, but he stands his ground.

Allison shouts, “He’s not human,” as though Boyd and Stiles don’t have eyes.

“Really?” Stiles says drily. “Color me surprised. Also, Boyd, I was _so fucking right_ about the werewolf thing.” Stiles can be immature and annoying, but his head’s screwed on right in the field and he has nerves of fucking steel; his gun doesn’t waver from where he has it trained on Allison Argent.

“Shut up,” Hale says. “This doesn’t concern you.” He points a claw at Allison. “Get off our land, code-breaker.”

“The last time I was in Beacon Hills, you murdered my grandfather,” Allison says. She fires the shotgun again and this time Hale absorbs the blow completely, his torso barely flinching under the force of the shot. “Now you and your sister are biting humans. Are you rebuilding the Hale pack, Derek?”

“Jackson Whittemore asked for the bite,” Hale says quietly. “It was his choice. Laura gave it to him when he asked.” The khaki shirtfront of his uniform has been shredded by the shotgun blasts, and through the tears in the fabric Boyd can see the smooth, unmarked planes of his chest. Does the artifact affect everyone who touches it? That can’t be the case if it’s Allison’s—she clearly both hates werewolves and isn’t one.

Allison reaches into the pocket of her leather jacket and pulls out two new cartridges, which she loads slowly into her shotgun. “Do you smell that?” she asks Hale conversationally. “Wolfsbane.”

Hale folds himself into a low crouch, but he’s close enough that making himself into a smaller target isn’t going to do much to help him against her. “Allison,” Boyd shouts, “put down your weapon.”

“He isn’t human,” Allison repeats. With her mouth flattened like it is now, she looks like her aunt and grandfather—unhappy and driven. “This isn’t the concern of the Secret Service.”

“It’s cute that you think we’re going to let you shoot the fucking sheriff because we’re not cops,” Stiles says loudly. “ _Put down the gun_.”

“He _murdered_ my _grandfather_ ,” Allison shouts back. “I only found out a few—look, there isn’t any evidence and there won’t ever be, but he did it and he needs to be punished for that.”

“How many have you killed, Allison?” Hale asks. “How many fires have you set to hide the bodies?”

Allison’s lips disappear altogether in the dark line of her mouth. She’s completely ignoring Boyd and Stiles as she raises the shotgun and aims—which is when Boyd hits her with a charge from his Tesla.

“Fuck,” says Hale through his mouthful of teeth, as he looks down at Allison’s body curled up like the last frame of a _Terminator_ sequel, smoke pouring out of the windows of the hotel behind her. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a Tesla,” Stiles says. “Can you—sheathe those, or something?” He gestures with his elbow to the general area of Hale’s clawed hands as he lowers his Beretta. “She’s going to be up soon and not remember any of the last five minutes.”

“What the hell,” Hale repeats blankly. He cracks his neck twice and the teeth and claws melt away, along with the strange color of his irises. Between the mess of his shirt and the stubble along the edge of his jaw, he looks someone from the cover of one of the romance novels Erica and Stiles like to read aloud to each other in the Warehouse office. Stiles is staring at him kind of stupidly, like he’s never seen a well-defined chest before.

Rather than deal with that can of fucking worms, Boyd approaches Allison and crouches down at her side. He’s apprehensive about touching the pendant itself, so he pulls out his Swiss Army knife and cuts the cord from around her neck, pulling it free and letting the pendant swing far away from his body. He can feel the warmth of it radiating against his side, and it makes him uncomfortable to have it so close.

“Can you get the neutralizer from the backseat?” he asks, and Stiles stops staring in an embarrassing fashion at Hale’s pectorals and goes to do his job. Right before Boyd lowers the necklace into the neutralizing jelly, he looks up and catches Hale staring back at Stiles, his fists clenching and unclenching by his sides. Of _course_ Stiles fell for the werewolf sheriff from Boyd’s hometown after one conversation and of _course_ the feeling is mutual. This is Boyd’s life, he shouldn’t even be shocked.

Boyd isn’t watching the moment that the pendant touches the surface of the neutralizer, which is why he’s caught just as off-guard as Hale and Stiles when the impact sends a rush of force outwards, propelling Boyd and Stiles off their feet and further into the parking lot and Hale into the stucco wall of the hotel.

The last time Boyd had a hit this hard, he was still playing college football. He takes a few breaths to get his shit together and then he rolls onto his feet, taking stock of any injuries. Other than his back aching like a motherfucker, he’s fine; Stiles, three yards away, groans as he shifts onto his hands and knees. “Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” he bites out. “Where the fucking hell did that fucking come from. Fuck.”

The hairs on the back of Boyd’s arms are raised but he can’t hear any ringing in his ears and his vision appears to be functioning normally. “I’ve never felt that before,” he admits, and Stiles groans as he shakes his head.

“Me either. Ow, ow, Jesus, how fucking old _was_ that thing?”

The only benefit to this embarrassing display of how little Boyd and Stiles actually know about their own job is that Derek Hale has been knocked unconscious against the side of the building and isn’t awake to see it. The hotel, unfortunately, is still on fire, and once Boyd has the wind back in him enough to struggle to his feet, he can hear the far-off sound of Beacon Hills’ sole fire engine coming to their assistance. This is the kind of mess Warehouse agents are supposed to avoid but in which Stiles and Boyd inevitably seem to find themselves enmeshed.

“Fuck,” Stiles says again. “We’re going to lose them if we get trapped at this scene. Ugh, you get Hale, I’ll get Argent. I hope nobody’s dying inside of that building right now.” He grunts as he hooks his hands under Allison’s arms and drags her towards the SUV. “I’m already feeling uncomfortably like a serial killer, I don’t need a bunch of burn victims on my conscience.”

When Boyd goes to get Hale’s limp body, he can see three hotel staff members piled, unconscious but still breathing, partially shielded behind a Ford F150 in the parking lot. “I don’t think anyone’s inside,” he says. “Hurry up, fire department will be here soon.”

“We wouldn’t want Deputy Dog to see the Secret Service kidnapping the sheriff,” Stiles agrees lightly. He already sounds fully recovered from that knock, but Boyd knows better than to judge Stiles by how he sounds. “Where do you want to take them? The station? It’s almost eight, that place is bound to be basically deserted at this time of day.”

“I think I know somewhere more suitable,” Boyd says.

~

Three hours later, looking severely put upon, Jackson Whittemore angrily shoves a mug of tea across his glass coffee table towards Boyd, who is sharing the loveseat with Lydia Martin as Stiles hovers, unbecoming and obvious, over Derek Hale, who is enjoying the first severe bruising of his entire life and has just finished bleeding on Whittemore’s pale designer furniture.

“So you’re telling me,” Jackson says prissily, “that there’s no such thing as werewolves, despite the fact that I was one this morning?”

“Yes,” Boyd says.

“Duh,” Stiles adds needlessly. “How many times do we have to tell you what a fucking artifact does before it’ll penetrate that thick layer of hairspray?”

“Suck my dick, Stilinski,” Jackson snaps. There’s a long-suffering huff from next to him, and although Boyd can see her hand move out of the corner of his eye, he decides to be magnanimous and allow Lydia to steal his cup of tea. She was married to Jackson at some point; she deserves it.

“Please, Jackson,” Allison says quietly from the corner opposite of where Hale is propped against a wingback chair, and Jackson’s jaw snaps closed. Of the four non-Warehouse staff members currently in Jackson’s immaculately white living room, Allison has probably taken the standard witness debrief the hardest. Jackson had been most vocal, of course, closely followed by Lydia’s penetrating questions about the mechanics of the artifact itself, but Allison and Derek Hale had been the ones who’d had to hear that a century’s worth of vendetta and murder between their families had been the result of a necklace smaller than Boyd’s hand.

Boyd’s read the Warehouse manual and he’s been a senior field agent for five years. He knows that artifacts are dangerous, that people die, that disaster and calamity often follow in the wake of an artifact left unregulated and out of the Warehouse for too long, but he’s never read or seen anything with the scope of this necklace. Derek Hale and Allison Argent have lost most of their families to this war, and it’d probably seemed more important when they at least had a fundamental species difference between them.

“I was born a werewolf,” Derek Hale finally says. “So was my sister. I’ve—been one my entire life.”

Boyd knows what he means. Sometimes, it’s easier to justify the existence of the wild parts of yourself instead of working to make them human again. For years after he’d gotten out of the marines, Frances had wanted him to talk to her about what had happened while he’d toured. She’d pestered him at every family dinner until she’d turned flushed and upset and then she’d stare pointedly at their mother and give it up until the next dinner.

Stiles says, “You’ll no longer be able to walk away from being thrown into a car, that’ll suck.” There’s enough actual glumness in his voice—Stiles’ obsession with superheroes had almost gotten them killed in the field once in Ottawa—that Derek Hale feels comfortable enough to say, “Thanks, Stiles,” in a deeply sarcastic voice.

Theoretically, Boyd and Stiles should account for every unexplained death in their file when they report back to the Warehouse, but the last thing Boyd feels like doing is sitting Allison Argent down and forcing her to explain the details of every dead thug ever hired by her family. Her grandfather and aunt, from the little Boyd had gleaned over the past few hours, had been a pair of particularly twisted individuals, but family is family and that loss is almost never fully recoverable.

Rarely do the artifacts lead Warehouse agents to deliberately evil people; it’s almost always the artifacts causing mischief in the lives of otherwise reasonable people. Boyd doesn’t know Allison well enough to know if she could be considered reasonable, but he remembers her from high school—the dimples in her smile, the overwhelming friendliness and kindness she’d shown, the way she’d tempered Lydia’s bristliness and Jackson’s bitching—and he doesn’t think that she’s any more malicious than Derek Hale.

Boyd looks at the sheriff of Beacon Hills, and he thinks about what it would take to forgive yourself for surviving most of your family, how long it might take to come to peace with the part of yourself that got them killed. He tries to imagine that part leaving you suddenly, and learning that the integral, black-and-white dynamics of your world are just the byproduct of what Erica has tentatively identified as Alexandre Dumas’ great-grandmother’s necklace.

He thinks about the fact that Peter Hale was killed by something the coroner chose to call a mountain lion.

“We should go,” he says quietly.

Stiles shoots him a deeply betrayed look. “I don’t know,” he hedges.

“Stiles,” Boyd says, “ _we should go_ ,” and Stiles mutters something under his breath that makes Derek Hale smile and swallow it back, too fast to be anything but authentic. Boyd can see his own future in Derek Hale’s face, and it’s a future filled with Stiles aggressively pining and lounging around the Warehouse office, crying into his journal like a fifteen-year-old.

“Have a nice afternoon, ma’am,” he says to Lydia, and she nods at him over her teacup. He remembers the torn look on Lydia’s face at Mrs. Jameson’s pizzeria, the way she’d not terribly subtly pumped him for information for her ex-husband and Derek Hale, and how she’d been startled into laughter and then upset that she’d lost control of herself. Boyd hasn’t been carrying a torch for Lydia Martin for the last seventeen years, but he can see how easy it would be to slip into one now.

“You too, Agent Boyd,” she says.

~

Two weeks after Boyd files the final copy of his Beacon Hills report with Deaton, he’s checking his email on his phone as Stiles whines to Erica about how much he misses Derek Hale’s eyebrows when he sees that he has an email from martin@math.caltech.edu.

 _This doesn’t work_ , the subject line of the email reads, and when Boyd opens the email itself he finds that the body is empty except for an automatic signature—Lydia Martin, PhD, Department of Mathematics—and there’s a PDF attachment that his phone is deeply unhappy about downloading.

The PDF turns out to be scans of an increasingly frustrated series of proofs attempting to explain how the Argent / Dumas necklace might have made the Hales into werewolves. He’s impressed by the outsourcing she’s clearly done to a few biochemists, but when he reads it a second time more thoroughly, this time just to appreciate the elegance of her math, he can’t see why she’d thought to email it to him in the first place.

Lydia Martin abhors failure; he wonders how many emails she’s sent, ever, about something she hadn’t been able to understand.

 _I’ll give you a hint_ , he sends back. _We filed it with other artifacts that cause chromatic shift_.

Exactly three minutes later, he gets, _That’s incredibly irresponsible of you. Unsurprising, considering that you went to that hack school MIT, but irresponsible nonetheless_.

 _I swear it’s true_ , he types out—carefully, Boyd’s fingers are too big to ever work nicely with an iPhone keyboard— _You can’t insult another hint out of me_.

 _That’s what you think_ , Lydia replies, and this time the body of the email has actual content—a phone number with a Los Angeles area code, punctuated by periods instead of dashes. Boyd stares at it for a long time, until he has it memorized, and it’s only when Erica kicks Isaac in the shin with a barked order to get his skinny ass off of her desk that he realizes he’s spent ten minutes looking at his phone that he have could spent talking to her.

He saves her number in his contacts and then texts, _Stiles has been trying and failing for six years_.

 _Please give me at least some credit_ , she responds, so quickly that she can’t have been doing anything but holding her phone, waiting for him. _I’d like to think that I can outperform someone who tried to fit an entire bag of Twizzlers in his mouth at once_.

At this point he’s deliberately baiting her, but Boyd remembers this much very clearly: Lydia Martin likes challenges. _Are you going to back that up with math?_

 _Watch me_ , she replies, and Boyd honestly has no intention of doing anything but.


End file.
